Understanding the Selenium framework and its components

As explained in Chapter 3, Top Web Test Automation Frameworks, the Selenium framework (available at https://www.selenium.dev/) consists of three core pillars – Selenium WebDriver, Selenium IDE, and Selenium Grid (you can read more about the pillars here: https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/grid/getting_started/). In this chapter, we will only focus on the WebDriver protocol with JavaScript language binding and Grid, and leave Selenium IDE for Chapter 13, Complementing Code-Based Testing With Low-Code Test Automation.

Selenium WebDriver

With the release of Selenium 4, the latest release at the time of writing, the framework became fully W3C-compliant (https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver1/). The richness of the WebDriver protocol enables developers to drive any possible action on a web application, running on all types of browsers.

To get started with Selenium WebDriver, simply install the node package through the...